A Charley Reese column reminds me of a great quote: In 1857, Macaulay, in a letter to an American friend, said: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both…. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth — with this difference…that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.”